They Tried to Erase Them—Now They’re Rebuilding

追加: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]We're trying to rekindle and and bring back to life our traditions and our culture. That's one of the reasons why we recently acquired 100 acres of our former 41,000 acres of reservation land granted us by the House of Burgesses in 1705, and we're putting up what we call a Cheroenhaka Town, which is a a palisade interactive Native American village, a tribal education center, and a museum, of which we're going to put artifacts in and exhibit.

[00:00:17]>> And this is in Southampton County, where you were originally. Right. And you're also having a powwow. Yes, we we have a powwow on July the 24th and the 25th.

[00:00:24]It's a celebration of the green corn harvest with the roasting ears already.

[00:00:27]So, come out and get a year corn, etc. But, this is our ninth annual powwow that we've done at the Southampton County Fairgrounds in Courtland, Virginia. But, this is really the 15th powwow. We do powwows in Nottoway County, because that's where we that's where we had first ethno-historic contact with the colonials when they were looking for the lost colony in Maneyo in 1608 at a village called Tame Hiton in Nottoway County. And we hold that the second Saturday of October.

[00:00:46]Then we do a powwow also at First Landing Foundation Historic Village at Fort Story. October the 19th, correction, November the 19th and November the 20th. November the 19th is a school day. We we did that last year and had public students. And is that the way that you're teaching young people and teaching the younger generations about your people? Yes, yes, yes. And one of the one of the concerns we have is that is the lack of of history relevant to the SOLs pertaining to Iroquoian speakers. And get as a quick getting back to our language that was recorded by John Wood, Professor of Mathematics at William and Mary in 1820.

[00:01:14]Thomas Jefferson bought the language in August of 1820. He thought we were Algonquian speakers, so he sent it to Peter du Ponceau, student of Indian languages in Philadelphia. And we have letters of interchange between Jefferson and Peter du Ponceau, where du Ponceau told Jefferson that our language was unequivocally Iroquoian. I'm so glad that, you know what I'm saying, I even, you know what I'm saying, experienced this. I I'm glad I experienced you from, you know what I'm saying, enlighten me from the internet to, you know what I'm saying, online, getting like one-on-one in-depth, giving me a lot of information that I can take back to my people as well. And hopefully, we could both get the everything messing with everything with the lineage and the and everything with the genealogy. This is no scam.

[00:01:54]This is all real. This is a real homeboy that put it down. He mean what he say.

[00:02:01]He got receipts and he put it down. He stands on business. Straight up. One love.